EXTRACT FOR
Awakened
(Author Unknown)

PART 1 - THE FIRST DAY

    

Chapter 1

    

    The doctors told him out in the hall outside her room that there was no change. After nearly three months, his wife remained in a coma.

    He had almost gone into the room to see her, just as he had done every single day for the last three months. This time, however, he decided not to. Seeing her lying there so still and lifeless, hooked up to tubes, destroyed him, firing up every single fiber of his being while turning his blood ice-cold. 

    He realized this time that he could no longer put himself through this agony. Looking at her pale, cold features numbed him, shedding him of all hope and filling his soul with an overpowering darkness he had never encountered before. This time, he'd stopped in his tracks just a step or two short of the doorway and stood there, stock-still, staring at the dirty tile at his feet while listening once again to their bleak news.

    When the throbbing in his head finally eased up, he took a few deep, labored breaths and closed his eyes. After what seemed an eternity, the chaos within him eventually grew slightly more distant and diminished in intensity. When he thought he was ready to return to cold reality, he turned around. His legs were stiff and heavy as he shuffled back down the corridor, which led to the elevators that would take him down to the ground floor...and then the exit...and the lobby...and eventually the outside world, where he'd be forced to face another day alone in the apartment, surrounded by her things, her scent, her touch...

    But without her.

    They asked him just the other day if he wanted to switch off the machines. If he wanted to stop her pain, her agony. If he was ready to begin his future without her at his side. They had been closely examining the monitors for several weeks and were all in agreement that her condition would most likely never improve.

    Stop her pain. Turn her off. Call it a day. Let her go. Make the decision that would forever rip his heart right out of his chest.

    Turn her off. As if she was nothing more than a kitchen appliance that no longer functioned properly. 

    Hell no, he thought, the memories cascading wildly in his brain. Her face. Her body. Her smile. Her touch. Her soft voice. The way she kissed him, made love to him, talked to him, treated him. Teased him. How she knew what he was thinking, what he would say even before he had said it aloud. How she brushed her hair, applied her makeup. How her face lit up with a smile whenever she caught him watching her dress in front of the full-length mirror. How she always had trouble flipping open the tab on the mustard container without splashing herself. The times he had made a mess on the kitchen counter because he hadn't noticed that she'd forgotten to tighten the cap on the olive oil bottle the last time she used it.

    The day they first met at the company picnic at Lake Nona that took place more than eight years ago would be forever etched in his memory.

    "I'm Morgan," she announced, walking right up to him and stopping just two feet away, smiling that bright dimpled smile he'd fallen in love with so quickly. "Morgan Lee. I'm their artwork and graphics girl."

    Her proud, confident manner startled and amazed him. She had just appeared, looking beautiful and animated in her maroon shorts and gold tank top, her long, toned legs tanned to a golden brown from the Central Florida sun. He'd been so surprised by her glow that every single thought in his head jumped ship, leaving him helplessly silent with her standing so close, her bright smile penetrating his spirit and sending a sensation of caressing warmth billowing through him.

    "You're Owen, right?" Her voice had somehow penetrated the thick silence which had instantly turned him into a block of insecurity. "Owen Roth?"

    When reality finally returned, sending with it a message that he should at least try to react in some sensible way, he decided that he should give this beauty some clear sign that he wasn't dead or nearly as unconscious as he appeared. He hoped his brain was still working and that he should at least try and let her know that he wasn't as lifeless as he seemed. Struggling to regain some of the dignity he was reasonably sure he still possessed, he took a breath and cleared his throat as subtly as possible. "That's what my driver's license says," he said awkwardly, and felt his pulse pumping harder than he ever imagined possible.

    She laughed at his response??"which told him that he'd either totally humiliated himself or said something clever. Since she hadn't immediately spun around and run away laughing hysterically, he assumed he hadn't convinced her that he was an idiot. 

    "I've seen you in the reception area several times," she said, still smiling. "You usually come in and talk with Stephanie, our buyer."

    The image immediately blipped in his head, and before he realized it, coherent thought??"as well as speech??"had finally come to the rescue. "The tall, skinny blonde with the heavy makeup, pricey wardrobe, and horrible perfume?"

    She laughed again, this time harder. "That's Stephanie, all right."

    "Sorry if I??""

    "It's all right." Then she turned, possibly to see if Stephanie was within earshot. When she turned back to him, she lowered her voice. "You've obviously never flirted with her." 

    She'd said it as if it was an accusation. He didn't know how??"or if??"he should reply.

    "It's true, isn't it?"

    He sighed and hoped he wouldn't sound smug. "I'm afraid so."

    She looked confused. "Everyone flirts with Stephanie. I mean everyone. Why haven't you?"

    The woman was arrogant and self-absorbed, and he clearly remembered the number of times she mentioned her membership with the local spa after complimenting him on how good he looked in a suit. He didn't like women who were so obvious or outspoken. 

    Morgan lowered her voice once again. "You can tell me, you know." She frowned, wrinkling her nose. "I don't really like her. Most of us don't. She's so...snooty. She also has a facelift or tummy tuck every time she goes on vacation."

    He didn't know if he should comment, so he just nodded.

    "Why haven't you joined the Stephanie fanbase? She likes you, you know. She has a type. It's usually a fit-looking, well-dressed, nice-looking guy with good hair and??"well, someone just like you." 

    He puffed up at her apparent compliment and tried hard not to grin like an idiot. This told him that she probably liked him, but he knew better than act stupid??"which could easily change her mind. He just shrugged. "I just don't like her."

    "Why not?"

    "She's...well, like I said, her perfume's really horrible."

    Morgan smiled.

    "I mean it. She was standing awfully close to me the other day. That stuff she was wearing made me want to look for the nearest hazmat suit. I grew nauseous and would have thrown up on her business suit if I hadn't been so afraid of grossing out everyone standing around."

    She laughed and pushed back a knot of shiny chestnut hair that had slipped in front of her cheekbone. "Is that the main reason? The perfume thing?"

    He just shrugged.

    "You're saying yes?"

    "I didn't say anything. I just shrugged."

    She blinked. "And just what does that shrug mean, Mr. Owen Roth?"

    Her saying his name did something to him, and he realized in that single moment that this woman was special. The rare type of girl he didn't want to let slip through his fingers. And when he said, "Could be that I knew the moment I first saw her that I wasn't gonna waste my time," he knew by the dimples marking her cheeks that this woman was one of those once-in-a-lifetime babes a guy with the usual amount of normal brain activity  just didn't pass up. 

    That wondrous event had happened more than eight years ago, when he was twenty-seven and she twenty-five. The company picnic had brought two Central Florida companies together to complete a long-awaited merger. His firm, Collins & Sons, specialized in the beautification of public gardens, while ImageFlorida, where Morgan worked, dealt with local advertising. Both firms were small, each boasting just twenty or so employees. With spouses and children, turnout for the picnic that day barely amounted to eighty in attendance.

    But the only thing he really cared about that day was Morgan Lee and how fantastic she looked in her shorts, tank top, and open-toed sandals, her thick chestnut hair that glistened in the Florida sunlight, and how great her long, shapely tanned legs filled the bright picture screen in his head.

    And her dazzling smile. But above all, her laugh, which was music to his ears, warming him all over.

    He didn't remember much at all about the picnic. There were the usual rah-rah speeches, as there were with any other company picnic. There was also plenty of food, and the beer had been brought over in kegs, along with half a dozen cases of cold drinks, and three large coolers stacked with blocks of ice. He didn't even remember what he ate, or even if he had eaten at all. All that filled his mind that day was the tall, slender, chestnut-haired beauty who had shared that day with him. That very special babe who left the picnic in her small copper Honda Accord and followed him to his Winter Park apartment, where she captured his heart as well as his spirit in a very short period of time. 

    Now, as he left the hospital to begin the long, agonizing walk back to his car, he could think only of the last few months, which now seemed like a lifetime, beginning with the call by the OPD to inform him that Morgan had been involved in a serious highway accident and that she'd been rushed to Orlando Regional Hospital, where she was placed in ICU due to brain trauma.

    On his way back to their apartment, he stopped at the intersection of Semoran and Colonial, where the accident had happened. He pulled into the side turnoff of the Mall, parked, then switched off the ignition. Then, for the next twenty minutes, he stared numbly at the heavy traffic and once again visualized the scene that had taken the love of his life away from him and turned her into the cold, lifeless form now hooked up to machines in a depressingly white, sanitized room.

    "T-boned," the cop on the scene had told him the moment he'd reached the hospital directly from the office, where he'd been in conference with his bosses, watching six middle-aged execs in expensive suits droning on loudly about some mindless company policy that made no sense whatsoever. "According to an eyewitness, she'd just proceeded through green to head north on Semoran when the silver Lexus moving west ran the light and slammed into her. Luckily, the idiot was only going twenty when he hit her. Otherwise?" The cop shrugged and looked disgusted.

    Otherwise...

    That one word left quite a bit to the imagination. Otherwise, in this sense, meant a great many things, none of them promising or even tolerable. Otherwise meant, in one sense, that if the idiot had been moving slightly faster, Morgan would have surely died. Or have been paralyzed. Or slammed even more brutally into the driver's window, where she would have most certainly suffered massive facial and head injuries.

    Since the idiot slamming into her hadn't been going very fast, the fact that Morgan was now lying in a hospital bed, hooked up to a battery of tubes keeping her organs functioning, seemed much, much better.

    Didn't it?

    Wasn't that what life was all about? Survival? Beating the Grim Reaper? Making it through another day? Keeping the organs from winding down and then shutting off completely?  

    He sat there in his usual cold, empty numbness, staring unseeingly at the constantly moving traffic while thinking of what had happened, and of the drunken idiot who had put her where she'd been the last three months. Then, after opening the console between the seats, he picked up the Smith & Wesson .45 revolver he had bought five years ago at the pawnshop on South Orange Blossom Trail. His pulse hastening, he checked the cylinder before snapping it shut and placing it back into its niche.

    His nerves sizzled as he pulled back onto the highway, heading west, for Parkway Towers Condominiums, the fancy apartment building on West Colonial, where the bastard who had destroyed the love of his life lived in luxury. And as he got back into traffic, he told himself that this dirtbag would be dead before the night ended.

    





    

Chapter 2

    

    Owen parked the Challenger on Broadway Avenue, across the street from the Parkway Towers, and sat staring at the rows of vehicles parked in the lot in front of the eighteen-story building.

    The high-rise appeared as it always had??"slightly weathered, its sandblasted face smudged with dust and grime from years of traffic and the elements. Palms and trimmed hedges embellished the block. Two young, slender figures walked down the street, smoking cigarettes. A middle-aged woman in a jogging suit wandered down Colonial, her Golden Retriever leading the way on a leash. Traffic went by.

    It was just a few minutes before eleven when a figure appeared from the building. The streetlamp lighting up the entrance showed that the figure was Hargrove. The man immediately walked down the paved aisle, where his vehicle, a new Lexus to replace the one he had damaged by smashing into Morgan's Honda, was parked. Dressed impeccably as usual, he adjusted the knot of his tie as he marched down the paved drive, whistling.

    One of the conditions of Hargrove's release was that he stayed away from bars and stopped drinking completely for a period of not less than six months. Though the accident with Morgan had taken place three months ago, Hargrove, as Owen had personally observed, had spent considerable time in bars, raising elbows with friends and wealthy investors during the last three or four weeks. 

    Owen's heart began thrashing wildly. His blood quickly heated up as he opened the console. With a shaky hand, he groped for the .45.

    As he held it in his hand, he noticed how much heavier it seemed. How much colder the metal felt. Although he had owned the gun for the last several years, it felt so foreign to him right now that he was tempted to switch on the interior light to see if something strange had happened. If some unseen force, for some unknown reason, had switched it with something bigger, something much heavier, more deadly.

    It was his imagination stepping in. The good part of his soul was rebelling against the evil. The darkness that automatically took over the moment he first saw Morgan lying comatose in her hospital bed and decided that the bastard responsible would die.

    He had to die, and he would die tonight.

    Then what? that cursed inner voice asked, as he clutched the revolver much more tightly and felt the skin of his palm melting into the wooden grip. 

    It doesn't matter, he told the voice.

    You can just walk away from this, you know...

    I don't want to.

    Really?

    Maybe now that I know that she's never coming home, that things will never be the way they once were... Maybe I won't want to go home and spend the rest of my life all alone...

    Are you sure?

    Yes.

    He switched off the voice before giving it more of a chance to change his mind. While watching the cursed figure venturing down the aisle, he pushed open the door of the Challenger.  

    The warm September night breeze gently caressed his sensitive flesh, and he shivered. Taking a deep breath, he quickly found his total purpose centered on the idiot who had slammed into Morgan.

    This was the despicable moron that, with the help of the team of law experts who specialized in vehicular homicide and involuntary manslaughter cases, had been given a suspended sentence.

    But none of that mattered. The only thing that did matter was that the bastard was going to die tonight.

    The .45 gripped tightly in his hand, Owen silently got out of the Challenger. After easing the door shut, he marched across the street, his focus on the dark figure getting out his keys, just a hundred feet away.

    His blood began to boil all over again. He took another deep breath and forced himself to concentrate on the job at hand.

    As he moved, the warm, irresistible memories 

    ("I've seen you in the reception area several times")

    swam around vigorously 

    ("And just what does that shrug mean, Mr. Owen Roth?")

    in his head. 

    His pulse hammered violently; he began shaking. Steady. Just a few more seconds. Then it will be all over. Morgan will remain comatose, but at least the idiot who put her in that hospital bed won't be out there, threatening other people's lives.

    At least that was something...

    Sighing deeply, he raised his arm. Then, steadying the gun with his other hand, he aimed the four-inch barrel. 

    Hargrove was now standing beside the driver's door, fiddling with his keys. The left side of his head was in clear view, less than a hundred feet away.

    A hundred feet was nothing. A hundred feet was a bull's eye he could manage at any shooting range all day long, day or night. A hundred feet was a comfortable distance for him. The kick of the .45 was substantial, but he was used to it. He'd been proficient with large caliber guns for years.

    This one's for you, Morgan, he thought as his eyes welled with hot tears. This is your one and only chance at vengeance. You can't do it yourself, so I'm gonna do it for you.

    Then, as he had learned years ago, when his father, a Vietnam vet, taught him how to shoot, he slowly expelled all the air from his lungs and began applying slightly more pressure to the trigger.

    Just then, a soft, high-pitched whimper close to his left side startled him. He dropped his arms and spun sharply toward the source of the sound.

    A dog was sitting on its haunches about three feet away, watching him intently.

    The back of his neck grew hot, and he stiffened. Then, bringing the gun to his right side and carefully depressing the hammer, he waited for his pulse to return to normal.

    The dog was large??"about forty or fifty pounds. In the haze of the streetlight at the corner its coat looked brown and white, but he knew this meant that it could be gold, or even red. The animal looked like some sort of Aussie mix. He couldn't see a collar or tag and assumed it must be a stray. But since it wasn't skinny or weak looking, he didn't think it had been on its own very long.

    However, the dog's size, shape or pedigree were not the issue here. It had approached him silently and purposefully. And for some strange reason he could not comprehend, it seemed to sense what he was about to do. 

    When reality nudged him back to the present, he realized that this stray had just upset his plan. He always loved dogs but hadn't owned one in many years. Morgan had been a dog-lover all her life and had lost her beloved yellow Lab Hannah just months before he met her. The loss had devastated her so much that she hadn't wanted to own a dog ever since.  

    He needed to make the dog go away. He couldn't possibly kill Hargrove while this animal was sitting right here, staring at him. It had already distracted him, and for this, a distraction would be the kiss of death. But all was not lost. It appeared to be a stray and would probably scare away easily. 

    "Are you lost?"

    The dog continued staring.

    "Where are your people?" Owen glanced up and down the street. He saw no one. "Your owners? Your mom? Your dad? A little kid you just ran away from because he wasn't paying attention and you weren't that fond of him anyway?"

    The dog continued staring at him.

    "I know it's late and all, but even so, you seem to be all alone." He realized he was talking to a dog and that he could not possibly get much of an acknowledgement, but he didn't know what else to do. "Can you possibly give me any sort of hint as to where??"which direction??"you came from?"

    No reaction.

    He glanced across the street. Hargrove had already gotten in the Lexus.

    Owen sighed tiredly but was confident he could still manage a shot if Hargrove drove up the ramp leading to Colonial. It would be a straight shot to the windshield, but the revolver was loaded with full metal jackets, which would easily penetrate safety glass. 

    "You really need to go back home, wherever that is. I'm about to do something very bad, and you can't be here for this. Unless you're a hunting dog, the sound of this gun will probably scare the hell out of you, not to mention hurt your ears. You know what they say about a dog's hearing, right?"

    The dog continued staring. Its eyes didn't shift from him.

    "I don't mean to be rude, but please go away. I mean it. If I do what I came here to do, this area will be a madhouse in just a few minutes. Get it? People and traffic all over the damned place. You might get hurt or run over if you stick around."

    Still no reaction.

    "Don't you have anywhere else you should be?" Owen shrugged. "Your people's home? Your doghouse in the backyard?"

    The steady hum of a vehicle increased in volume as it drifted up the ramp, in his direction. At that same moment, two cars headed down Broadway, making their way for Colonial. 

    His pulse skipped a beat. He needed to be invisible. 

    "No offense, but I've got to go. Nice chatting with you. And please don't wander onto the road and get run over. It would tear me apart to see you lying there, turned into roadkill."

    Again, no reaction. 

    Forcing his attention away from the dog, Owen hurried down the street, toward his car. He stopped halfway down the block, out of range of the streetlights and near an untrimmed bush. In seconds, the Lexus reached the end of the drive. Then, without pause, it turned left and shot in front of fast-moving traffic on Colonial.

    He watched the silver blur and felt his grip tightening around the grip of the .45. It took a conscious effort to pull his finger away from the trigger. Another day, you bastard, he sent after the fleeing car. Next time, you won't luck out because I won't let anything distract me again.

    A slight whimper broke the silence directly behind him.

    He turned.

    The dog was sitting as it had before, staring up at him.